[On November 13, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, DC. So for its 40th anniversary, I’ll AmericanStudy the Wall and four other unique examples of public art. Share your thoughts on these & any other public art projects you’d highlight!]
On two levels to
why the controversial
memorial is so important.
Collective
memory has always been a serious issue when it comes to Vietnam veterans. As
early as the late 1970s and early 1980s, that sizeable American community was
seemingly being forgotten
and ignored, most especially when it came to our governmental and societal
unwillingness to address and help with their far too frequent
struggles with issues like illness, mental health, homelessness, and more. Fictional
Vietnam vet John Rambo’s moving
final speech in First Blood (1982)
highlights both those issues and this perception of a forgotten community very
fully and powerfully. But that’s also an illustration of another layer to the
collective memory problem: as pop culture texts started to push back and offer
representations of Vietnam vets, they were just that, pop culture
representations. Sometimes they were more thoughtful (I’m a big fan of Bruce
Springsteen’s, shockingly), sometimes they were less so (what happened to
John Rambo across that first film’s many, increasingly silly sequels, for
example), but they were always cultural characters, not the lived experiences
and identities of actual Vietnam vets (with occasional exceptions like Born
on the 4th of July).
But in the same year
that First Blood was in theaters, indeed
just three weeks after that film’s October 22nd release, Maya
Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled on the National Mall. Some
veterans and politicians argued that the talented college student’s proposed
design (which won a
nationwide competition) was too depressing and/or didn’t pay sufficient
tribute to the veterans, leading to the addition of Frederick Hart’s statue The Three Soldiers two years later. But
I would argue precisely the opposite: I don’t know of any war memorial that
pays more focused and specific tribute to soldiers themselves (rather than the
broader ideas or shared myths about and behind the war in question, for
example). The choice to include the names of every U.S. soldier who had been
killed or gone missing in the combat, nearly 58,000 at the time (and the number has grown since),
was to my mind an absolutely stunning way to focus visitors’ attention on not
only that particular, tragic group, but also the more than 2.5 million U.S.
servicemen and women who took part in the conflict. That is, seeing each and
every one of these names likewise reminds us of all the other names, and makes
it far more difficult to forget the service, sacrifices, struggles, and stories
of all those veterans.
There’s another
layer to that significance as well. I imagine I’ve written before in this space
about one of my greatest frustrations with 21st century political rhetoric:
the way the phrase “support the troops” has been coopted to mean “support our
wars,” even though all too often (if not indeed inevitably) war means mostly
very bad things for the troops. (This 2015
James Fallows column made that case very potently.) Far too much of the
time, the answer to that from those who (like me) are generally opposed to wars
has been to separate from these narratives overall, making it far more
difficult for us to express any support for our troops in the process. But the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial represents a perfect expression of a third way—a
piece of public art that, it seems to me
and others, does as a “gash
on the landscape” offer a critique of the war itself; and yet one that at
precisely the same time expresses the moving support for all of the troops, past
and present, about which I wrote in the last paragraph. If that’s true, that
would make this not only our best war memorial, but one of the most important
pieces of public art in our history.
Next public art
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other public art projects you’d highlight?
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